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Yahoo search completes full scale transition to Bing at last

It has been a long time coming, but Yahoo is now reporting that their search back end in the US and Canada for web, image, and video searches on mobile and desktop platforms has been fully moved over to Microsoft technologies.

Shashi Seth of Yahoo today proudly proclaimed that “the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete.” Yahoo says that there are “more markets to come.”

The companies both put up blog posts on the topic today that are short enough to share, and will be pasted below. Both posts note that the main transition, after endless planning of course, took place in the last week. Bing and Microsoft described the transition as going “smoothly.”

Following mutual back-patting, Yahoo and Microsoft both promise individual work on monetizing search, something that their shareholders will surely applaud. Congratulations to the companies for succeeding in such a large initiative.

First let me say, wow, what a week! As I hope everyone saw our post from last week, Yahoo! began transitioning certain back-end functions for Yahoo! Search over to Microsoft’s search platform. Well, I am proud to announce that the transition of organic search between Yahoo! and Microsoft is complete (for more information, check out Microsoft’s blog post).

Yahoo! Web, Image, and Video search experiences on both desktop and mobile devices are now powered by the Microsoft platform in the US and Canada (English), with more markets to come. The speed in which this was completed is a testament to the great work and partnership between a number of Yahoo! and Microsoft employees, the ranks of which are numerous. I’d like to express my sincere appreciation for each person who contributed to this great accomplishment.

With this week’s milestone behind us, Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network. As we shared last week, we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come.

We continue to achieve our goals and I look forward to the opportunities ahead of us all.

In our last update we shared that we had begun testing Bing results in Yahoo! search as we move forward with our transition.

Today I am happy to share that Bing is powering Yahoo!’s search results in the US and Canada (English only for now, the other languages will come in the weeks and months ahead).

So what’s next? We continue to work hard on the migration to adCenter, and are optimistic about completing this phase later this fall. As we have said all along, our primary goal is to provide advertisers with a quality transition experience in 2010, while being mindful of the holiday season.

This is a great milestone for Bing and Yahoo! and our customers, and we are happy to report the transition has gone smoothly and we feel great about the progress our search alliance has been making over the summer.